Strike Suit Zero: Director's Cut Review

Oh winged death, how we’ve missed you...

I swoop toward the underside of the enemy carrier ship, currently preoccupied with pulverising ours, silencing three heavy guns for good with a swarm of space-age sidewinders. Every little helps, but it’s not enough. I swerve into an effortless slide alongside the leviathan’s hull, randomly battering it with hot plasma as much as my trigger fingers can muster. The carrier takes a lot of damage, but not enough to stop it. It’s still covered in turrets.

Those bloody turrets.

A barrage of fire strips my shields to nothing, so I pull up hard and slam the thrusters on. Keep moving. Never mind the enemy fighters, just keep moving. Run until the chassis stops thundering with the impact of flak. The shield batteries glimmer into life - a signal from the skies, it feels, that it is time to make them pay.

Kill the thrusters and throw the crate around. There she is, the big bully.

I don’t like bullies. Or turrets.

Engage Strike Suit mode. Muscle memory has all the targets painted for the missile guidance system before I even realise it’s what I’m about to do. Release. A barrage of neon death vomits forth with the force of a thousand games writers hammering poor similes into a keyboard.

The turrets are gone. Screw you, turrets.

Our capital ship escapes, for my anti-turret efforts have successfully triggered the mini-cutscene that says so. I know how it works, but I don’t care. I am winged death. I haven’t felt like this since Freespace 2. Freespace 2 was a long time ago.

And it’s running on a console, which is weird, but wonderful. Crucially, it’s also accessible.

Space combat is coming back, and it’s coming back for everyone. Strike Suit Zero is a wonderful reintroduction. Though its obviously-not-AAA budget is betrayed by the lo-fi storytelling device of dishing out exposition via radio chatter, and it has an obsession with making you take out turrets on things, it’s pretty fantastic, and one of the best titles on next-gen right now.